Courses Taught (Fall 2017)

Office Hours

Day

Time

M

2:20 P.M. - 3:20 P.M.

W

2:20 P.M. - 3:20 P.M.

F

2:20 P.M. - 3:20 P.M.

Biography:

Edgard Sankara received his Licence (B.A) and Maîtrise from the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), his M.A. from the University of Oregon and his Phd in French/Francophone studies from the University of Texas-Austin. Dr. Sankara’s book Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies: From Africa to the Antilles was published by the University of Virginia Press (2011). Dr. Sankara has published articles in Nouvelles Etudes Francophones, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and Itinéraires, littérature, textes, cultures. Dr. Sankara teaches courses in Francophone African and Caribbean literatures. His recent courses include: “Négritude-Antillanité-Créolité,” “Francophone African cinema,” “Francophone Women Writers” and a graduate seminar on “Literature of immigration.”

He is currently at work on a book-length project on life narratives in Burkina Faso and their connections with history, politics, and readers’response.

Degrees:

Phd, University of Texas-Austin

M.A., University of Oregon

BA, Maîtrise, University of Ouagadougou

Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies: From Africa to the Antilles

“Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of autobiography, Edgard Sankara considers a cross-section of postcolonial francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean in order to examine and compare for the first time their transnational reception. Sankara not only compares the ways in which a wide selection of autobiographies were received locally (as well as in France) but also juxtaposes reception by the colonized and the colonizer to show how different meanings were assigned to the works after publication.

Sankara’s geographical and cultural coverage of Africa and its diaspora is rich, with separate chapters devoted to the autobiographies of Hampâté Bâ, Valentin Mudimbé, Kesso Barry, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Maryse Condé. The author combines close reading, reception study, and postcolonial theory to present an insightful survey of the literary connections among these autobiographers as well as a useful point of departure for further exploration of the genre itself, of the role of reception studies in postcolonial criticism, and of the stance that postcolonial francophone writers choose to take regarding their communities of origin.”

Browse The Polyglot

“The languages and literatures of the world are not an esoteric field of study, but rather the expressions of everyone’s humanity. Learning foreign languages makes the people who speak them less “foreign” and emphasizes the interconnectedness we feel as people.”